The Thinker: A CMA Blog

The Cleveland Museum of Art is proud to welcome electronic artist Mark Fell to Transformer Station on Wednesday, November 13 as part of the CMA Concerts at Transformer Station series. The concert series aims at showcasing eclectic and adventurous music in the Hingetown arts venue.

In tribute of the many female artists who paved the way for those today, THE GIRLS IN THE BAND(2011) tells the poignant, untold stories of female jazz and big band instrumentalists and their fascinating, groundbreaking journeys from the 1920s to today. We catch up with the film's director before the film's screening at the CMA this weekend.

Many works of African art refer to and derive meaning from an invisible realm beyond the material world, serving as conduits between the living and the spirits, as conveyed throughout the Cleveland Museum of Art's newest exhibition, Fragments of the Invisible. In the spirit of Halloween and MIX: Underneath, we go beneath the surface and examine the spirituality and power behind masks, particularly the Helmet Mask on view in the exhibition.

Fragments of the Invisible marks the American debut of 34 works of Central African art acquired in 2010 by the Cleveland Museum of Art from the Belgian couple René and Odette Delenne. Many of the works that make up this transformative acquisition have never before been published nor displayed, until the exhibition opens on Sunday, October 27, 2013.

It is clear from examples that survive from the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, that the crucifix, in the hands of a great artist, achieved the status of a consummate work of art. The Cleveland Museum of Art possesses a beautiful example of a large-scale, painted crucifix made in Pisa during the 1230s. The majestic Cleveland crucifix is one of the few elaborate painted Italian crosses in the United States.

In a unique partnership between Lakeland Community College, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Laura and Alvin Siegal Lifelong Learning Program, a three session mini-course this month will deepen the connections between fine arts, film, and graphic fiction. The course, co-developed by the CMA, consists of three 90 minute weekly live video conferences, which explore the origins, genres, and influences of graphic fiction and narrative.

One quick visit to the current exhibition at the CMA, Less is More: Minimal Prints, will illustrate the power behind such seemingly straight-forward art and explain how that initial reaction is not far from what was intended. The museum’s Curator of Prints, Jane Glaubinger, provides us with some explanatory background on this exhibition and its featured artists.

In Luxuriance: Silks from Islamic Lands, 1250–1900, the most distinguished areas of the world highlighted include textiles from Islamic lands including Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Spain, and Turkey. Beginning the first week of September, we spotlight a different period within the collection here on the CMA blog. This final week, we focus on the textiles of Egypt and Syria.

Praxiteles: The Cleveland Apollo is an in-depth examination of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s ancient bronze sculpture, a figure known since antiquity as Apollo Sauroktonos, or Apollo the Lizard-Slayer. The masterwork will be showcased alongside two ancient Roman marble copies, one on loan from the Louvre Museum, Paris, France and the other from the Liverpool World Museum. This is noteworthy since all three sculptures have never been displayed together before.